A pair of very rare lead figures representing Spring and Winter

These figures are both  initialled WG and LW for Walter Gilbert and Louis Weingartner. Walter Gilbert established the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts near Worcester in 1894. It was at first involved with decorative ironwork, but the business soon expanded into a great many other fields, including the manufacture of stained glass windows, as well as decorations for the interior of houses, ships and churches. By 1900 Gilbert had gone into partnership with a Mr McCandlish and had taken over further premises in the town which housed bronze and lead foundries, as well as  wood and stone carving studios. In the same year the guild won a prize medal at the Paris Exhibition for it’s art nouveau style bedroom.  By 1908 the firm had established an outlet in London in Fenchurch Street and as a result of their most famous commission, the iron and bronze gates outside Buckingham Palace, they were issued with a Royal Warrant, appointing them metal workers to Edward VII.

At the end of the First World War in 1918, Gilbert left the Bromsgrove Guild and set up a new firm in Weaman St, Birmingham, where he was followed by a number of Bromsgrove Guild craftsmen.  Amongst them was Louis Weingartner who had been one of the first and most significant of all the continental craftsmen to join the Bromsgrove Guild. He had been born into a large working class family in Lucerne, Switzerland. Early in his life, Weingartner’s creative talents were identified and as a young man he crossed the alps to further his artistic training in Florence.  Having returned from Italy, Weingartner then worked for several years at the Bossart jewellery firm. When exactly he came to England is unknown, but he was working at a studio in London when he first became known to Walter Gilbert. Weingartner was an exceptionally skilled sculptor, metalworker and designer, whose later work ranged from fountains, statues and simple memorials to the Royal Coat of Arms on the Buckingham Palace gates and the magnificent reredos in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. It was said that he was such a perfectionist that he would sit at his work all day without a single break until the model was finished to his satisfaction.

Walter Gilbert and Louis Weingartner forged a remarkable creative relationship, collaborating on several of the Bromsgrove Guild’s most famous commissions, which continued after his move to join Gilbert at the Weaman St studio in Birmingham.  In retirement Weingartner returned to his native Switzerland where he died in tragic circumstances three years later.  The unfortunate man fell under a tram in Lucerne’s Station Square and suffered serious head injuries from which he died two weeks later, aged 72.

The lead figures of Summer and Winter are both illustrated in Gilbert and Weingartner’s  “Sculpture in the Garden” catalogue, which is undated but probably published shortly after the figures were produced in 1926.  In the catalogue forward, the lead garden figures are described as  having “ a  delicious feeling of whimsicality rarely met with in sculpture, but when encountered in  garden sculpture immediately produces  the feeling of entire suitability.... there is  another kind of humour  in the dreamingly designed and modelled “Seasons”, delightful children”.

Literature; The Bromsgrove Guild” by Quintin Watt, published 1999 by the Bromsgrove Society.

Antique Garden Ornament, John Davis, Antique Collector’s Club, 1991, pp 313-316.